Chapter 1. Introduction

1. Welcome to GIMP

GIMP is a multi-platform photo
manipulation tool. GIMP is an acronym for
GNU Image Manipulation Program. The
GIMP is suitable for a variety of image
manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image composition, and
image construction.

GIMP has many capabilities. It can be used as a
simple paint program, an
expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing
system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed
to be augmented with
plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting
interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex
image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

One of The GIMP's strengths is its free
availability from many sources for many operating systems. Most
GNU/Linux distributions
include The GIMP as a standard application.
The GIMP is also available for other
operating systems such as Microsoft Windows™
or Apple's Mac OS X™
(Darwin). The GIMP
is a Free Software application covered by the General Public License
[GPL]. The GPL
provides users with the freedom to access and alter the source code that
makes up computer programs.

1.1. Authors

The first version of the GIMP
was written by Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball. Many other developers
have contributed more recently, and thousands have provided support and
testing. GIMP
releases are currently being orchestrated by Sven Neumann and Mitch
Natterer and the other members of the
GIMP-Team.

1.2. The GIMP Help system

The GIMP Documentation Team and other
users have provided you with the information necessary to understand
how to use GIMP. The User Manual is
an important part of this help. The current version is on
the web site of the Documentation Team
[GIMP-DOCS] in HTML format. The HTML
version is also available as context sensitive help (if you installed
it) while using GIMP by pressing the
F1 key. Help on specific menu items can be accessed
by pressing the F1 key while the mouse pointer is
focused on the menu item. Read on to begin your
GIMP journey.

1.3. Features and Capabilities

The following list is a short overview of some of the features and
capabilities which GIMP offers you:

A full suite of painting tools including brushes, a pencil, an
airbrush, cloning, etc.

Tile-based memory management, so image size is limited only by
available disk space

Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high-quality
anti-aliasing

Full Alpha channel support for working with transparency

Layers and channels

A procedural database for calling internal GIMP
functions from external programs, such as Script-Fu

Advanced scripting capabilities

Multiple undo/redo (limited only by disk space)

Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip

Support for a wide range of file formats, including GIF, JPEG, PNG,
XPM, TIFF, TGA, MPEG, PS, PDF, PCX, BMP and many others